PEACE ELUDES THE WORLD, 2003

“Peace came not once, but twice, when I was at a very impressionable age (a high school student in Indianapolis when I drew the search for peace for the school newspaper) when first Germany surrendered and then Japan and the citizens of Indiana’s capital jumped exuberantly into the twin fountains of the monument celebrating two other peaces — that of the Civil and Spanish American wars. In my own archives I still have the newspapers heralding those peaces of 1945. I graduated in 1946 and went on to pursue my long journey toward art. By a chronological fluke I missed both interludes of non-peacefulness: Korea and Viet Nam, only to be in New York on September 11 on my way to my exhibit in France on the twelfth when peace was dramatically ended once more. Peace ever elusive!” — Robert Indiana